I've now decided that I'm going to use the DV Camera I bought a while back and begin making films. I already have a sweded version of Doctor Who, a Space Opera Romance set mainly/entirely on Terra, and a Romantic Comedy Vampire flic lined up. However, nothing for Hard SciFi. Given the low budgets involved, there has to be no zero-G, or even partial-G, involved. Of course, I can always handwave away the issue of gravity on other planets by claiming that they're weighted down with equipment, and say that they interplanetary transport craft is spun to generate centrifugal acceleration; for the landing scenes, I was thinking of utilizing footage from the Lunar lander competition - hey Carmack, do I have permission to use Armadillo's?

Right, now that's the need for much special effects done away with. I'll say the planets have all been partially terraformed, so they just need to carry Oxygen and masks. Now I've got them doing that... any story ideas?

I've started thinking somewhat along the lines of Firefly (which I've yet to see; I'm getting it off Amazon), set in the solar system with partially terraformed worlds. Hopefully, I've got access to some editing tools.

Actually, it probably could. If I remember correctly, the story wouldn't need too many special effects. And the special effects that there are could probably be done with a cheap or free video editing software on a computer. If you get volunteer actors, you could probably do it. The Foundation series is about "psycohistory", a scientific way of predicting the future. It isn't about space battles and rocket ships. But I don't know anything about movie making, and I last read the foundation series years ago, so take it with a grain of salt. In any case, there are alot of good scifi novels and stories that don't have movies made of them.

_________________“Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.” -Anonymous

Also, note that filming anything existing is a violation of copyright, unless you have permission, or the work is old enough for the copyright to have expired. Besides, come on! Be creative!

_________________Say, can you feel the thunder in the air? Just like the moment ’fore it hits – then it’s everywhereWhat is this spell we’re under, do you care? The might to rise above it is now within your sphereMachinae Supremacy – Sid Icarus

I've managed to come up with an idea which I think could work, set in the Saturn system (so that we can have inhabited worlds and dense asteroid belts, with short travel times). It has a free trader who operates on the borders of the law, who finds that he's picked up something unexpected whilst on a routine trading mission at a mining station - the station owner's 19 year old daughter, who wishes to escape her oppressive father. After explaining her reasons - and showing him the expensive Terran trinket which her mother gave her to buy her passage off the station - he decides to take her with him.

This is not taken too well by the owner of the station, who calls up his contacts throughout the system to try to get her - and the trinket - back. Unfortunately for him, he lets them know that they are being pursued by launching a few ships of his own from the station after them. Now knowing that they're being pursued, they seek shelter in one of the rings, and make their way to a "wretched hive of scum and villainy" hidden within a moonlet several hundred meters wide...

...and that is all the plot so far. Though the ship will blow up at the end, only for them to find that the trinket is worth enough for them to buy a much bigger trading vessel.